The Official Website for the Theory and Practice of Kevin Behan's Natural Dog Training

Virtual Reality Continued

Thanks Lee: hopefully my responses to your comments and questions will help clarify the model and flesh it out in all its particulars. Thanks.

KB: Perhaps my next article (Nature/Desire) will address your points more precisely, but for now let me just say that the nature-of-information is variability, but not variation by virtue of some random process. Rather as emotional beings become entrained they will always end up manifesting complementary traits; they will manifest a wave pattern to everything they do. Therefore even were two beings to be in the same field, there still has to be an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic between them that is independent of an actual field so that this differentiation as one becoming the equal/opposite relative to the other can transpire. My premise being that this emotional ionization happens through physical memory. Whereas if two individuals tune into the same electrical field there’s no guarantee they will respond to it in a complementary way. However if it is a virtual field that arises from the physical memories they each trigger in each other, then what one does will reflect back onto the other, and vice versa, and only in this way can their interaction evolve into the pattern of differentiation which we otherwise know of as sociability. Otherwise it’s up to them to figure out mentally what to do.

LCK: Meanwhile, I don’t see how a virtual field could in any way affect actual physical behavior. There is no virtual tail-wagging, virtual leash-biting, virtual squirrel chasing, or virtual peeing on fire hydrants.

KB: Actually there is and this characterizes all of animal learning. We can condition a dog to experience something, and then trigger it with a cue and the dog will perform a complex series of behaviors just as if it’s experiencing the real thing. For example, a police or protection dog has to perform what’s called a “courage test” where the helper first runs away a long distance and at 100 yards out the dog is sent after him. As the closes in, suddenly the helper turns and runs at the dog, waving a stick and hollering at the top of his lungs. The process of training for this began with the helper back pedaling while confronting dog with stick raised and so much later when the dog sees the helper threatening and confronting it, it nevertheless feels the helper as moving away. The good dogs become so energized, that when the helper is running at it they launch at the helper with the velocity needed to make contact given that trajectory of a fleeing person. Needless to say with that kind of emotional computation they hit like a linebacker and this becomes an ingrained behavior that needs little reinforcement since it’s what they apprehend this intense crash as the feeling that leads to the grounding. If on the other hand, the developmental process is botched, the dog learns to hesitate and thereafter much more carefully chooses its launch point. The virtual reality induced by physical memory has to precede the actual experience in order for an animal to learn something complex.

LCK: I understand the idea of virtual gravity — <i>it’s just as if the animal is an object of mass</i> — but again I don’t see how a virtual form of energy or anything else could affect physical behavior.

KB: The physical and neurological affects that physical memory incites in the body/mind is what creates the virtual energy. I posted an article on why-dogs-prefer-to-drink-from-toilet-bowls to explore this more fully.

LCK: What’s wrong with just calling it <i>emotional</i> gravity? From what I understand there are still many, many questions to be answered about what gravity is and how and why it works. There’s string theory, torsion physics, and more. So while the general consensus in the minds of most people is that mass = gravity, that may not be the whole story. Is the behavior of a black hole due to its enormous mass or its enormous energy, or both? On a certain level aren’t mass and energy the same thing? If emotion can be stored in the body as electro-chemical energy, why does it have to be virtual?

KB: If we were actually tasked with designing a doggy robot with a functional kind of consciousness, I feel these distinctions would soon become overwhelmingly significant. We do know that gravity isn’t a real force of attraction, but a virtual force. There is no actual force of attraction between objects of mass; they move toward each other as the result of a displacement in the space/time continuum. So there is no actual force of attraction that draws animals together, rather there is a displacement of the current stasis an individual is in as a ratio of hunger/balance, and this excitation of nerve energy by the imbalance needs to be grounded, and so animals act just as if there is a real force of attraction. Meanwhile mass doesn’t mean weight, it’s defined as resistance-to-acceleration. So emotional mass is the physical memory of resistance to the virtual force of attraction and keeps the animal on track, resistant to being accelerated by some change out of its feelings, habits or instincts.

LCK: I don’t think a real, rather than a virtual, field would have to be in complete control of anything. It would be part of the feedback/tuning mechanism, acting both as a template and a potential catalyst. Telepathy doesn’t of itself control anything. It simply gives the animal mind access to one stream of information, emotion: tele/<i>distant</i>, pathy/<i>feeling</i>. So it’s just one part of a very real, not virtual, communications system. At any rate, if the purpose of feelings is to <i>turn change into information</i> — and I’m not sure that’s the whole story; I think feelings motivate an animal to take action, they create tension but they can also create, or at least foster, harmony –, then I would have to say that since telepathy is a normal biological function in animals (and in some humans if they can turn off their brains and tune into their gut feelings), it must play some role in doing all that.

KB: Yes, I believe that feelings have everything to do with achieving harmony and that this is in service to turning change into information. I will develop this idea further in “Nature Conforms to the Power of Desire.” However if the field isn’t the same as an auto-tuning/feedback mechanism then it seems to me that would only leave thinking as the tuning/feedback mechanism.

LCK: I agree that it’s not very practical to try to communicate telepathically to a dog who’s scared of thunderstorms not to worry, that “everything’s going to be okay,” or to telepathically tell a dog to sit (though I’ve done that, accidentally). Telepathy is just one informational stream. The question is, why is it there?

KB: The unified field is necessary so that evolution can happen. It mandates that the future is indeterminate; it can be changed by emotion. Thus the virtual field of emotion and feelings proves to be a modeling device that can be imposed on the real field.

KB: The balance imperative is invoked anytime output (behavior) doesn’t equal input (stimulation)… This is the body/minds’ means of dissipating energy in order to satisfy the balance mandate which is the tuning component of animal consciousness as an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic in order to implement the ever present principle of emotional conductivity by which any two organisms differentiate relative to each other. …

LCK: It just seems to me that when you describe the need for balance in terms of the “fear of falling,” and relate it back to a puppy’s experiences of being knocked down by his littermates, there’s a subtle implication, at least for me, that the dog is “thinking” about this stuff. “If I’m not careful I might fall…” It’s too linear for me. If two animals feel a combination of attraction and resistance, and one can see that playing out in how they interact, where does the fear of falling come into it? They may be looking for ways to achieve internal balance, both physically and emotionally, but neither is afraid of suddenly falling down, which is what I think is being implied.

KB: Learning to ride a bike has nothing to do with the thought of falling, but the feeling of collapse. And as the feeling achieves a higher and higher capacity so that it becomes harder and harder to collapse, then the bumps in the road, which might at first have invoked an outright heart-stopping panic, can then become thrills. So the balance influence is the fine-tuning mechanism that can have an infinite range, from an abject fear of collapse, to a modulation as in an intensity spike in a radio wave.

If the resistance gets too intense, the feeling of attraction can collapse, and this sudden evaporation of energy evokes the first memories of life on earth, falling. The puppies go from the weightlessness of the womb to the weighted-ness and fear of falling at the instant of birth. The degree of displacement, i.e. rapidity of acceleration, is variable and thus there can be a very fine gradient of sensations tied to reaching a breaking point, and coming after a breaking point, all of which are related to the master sensation of full fledged falling.

LCK: We have different ideas of what binary means. Yes, in computers it’s on or off. In consciousness Eros (life, sex, and creativity) and Thanatos (aggression, conflict, death wish); they oppose and compliment each other. Besides, for any change to take place — any real, lasting change, that is — there has to be a third force acting on the first two, the way a catalyst is necessary for a chemical reaction to take place.

KB: I can’t speak with any authority on these but I think we can look deeper into Eros/Thanatos and recognize them as elaborations of energy reflecting back and form between any two beings via their hunger/balance circuitries. Eros would be focus on preyful aspects, Thanatos focus on predator aspects, i.e. overcoming resistance to prey-making. In Hunger mode, the prey controls predator, in Balance mode the predator pushes energy onto the prey.

LCK: I also don’t think morphic fields are electrostatic in nature.

KB: I would suspect it would be everything, from gravity, electromagnetic to nuclear as well as whatever else there may be yet to discover.

LCK: I agree with everything you said except your use of the words <i>virtual</i> and <i>hunger circuitry</i>. (Note: I have no problem with <i>balance circuitry</i>.)

KB: If the little-brain-in-the-gut can apprehend preyful aspects from visual input, then the hunger circuitry is engaged and this is the primary function of sexual energy.

LCK: Again I agree with everything except the use of the word “hunger.” Eros and Thanatos are the two sides to sexual energy. In Darwinian terms the urge to reproduce is worth nothing without a commitment to protect one’s young at (nearly) any cost. So sex and aggression are just two different forms of the same energy; one is creative, the other destructive. The two may co-exist, though, so they’re not binary in computer terms.

KB: In my view, the urge for sex comes from a further arousal of the hunger circuitry as emotion cycles back and forth. Offspring are likewise perceived of as preyful and because both a sexual partner and offspring can reflect the projection of emotion back onto the projector of emotion, this allows the simple prey/predator modality to evolve into complex expressions such as tender care of a mate, or protection of the young. But then there are so many examples of mothers killing their young, wolves eating sick puppies, the lioness having no problem bearing the young of the Lion that just killed all her cubs, sexual predators/rapists and so on. These crude expressions reveal that the prey/predator modality remains as the basis of even the most complex relationships. In my model, sexuality and aggression are both forms of the same thing as means of accelerating emotional mass, specifically sexuality is the capacity to hold onto a feeling of attraction despite resistance, and is magnetic so that the urge to ingest evolves into the urge to deflect, whereas aggression is the means to overcome resistance to a feeling of attraction so that the individual fights to sustain contact with an object of resistance. Thus it is not coincidental that dogs are such sexual and aggressive animals, in service to the overarching program of sociability.

LCK: But it seems to me that if you want to reduce this to its purest essence, neither <i>hunger</i> nor <i>ingesting</i> are the right words, just as “fear of falling” isn’t quite right. I would say that <i>fear</i> and <i>desire</i> should do the trick, or perhaps <i>instinct</I> and <i>drive</i>. That’s because in the auto-tuning/feedback loop the nervous system is the safety mechanism (fear/balance) while the gut is the driving mechanism (desire/hunger). The third force is probably the morphic field.

KB: Emotion is based on desire and desire is one part arousal (hunger) coupled to one part vulnerability (balance). So when an animal is aroused, it feels in equal measure vulnerable and is immediately and innately inspired to be circumspective. If the object of its attraction can mirror this energy back at it, and has the same emotional capacity to go by feel and hence equal measure of arousal and vulnerability, then they will evolve from separate and distinct particles of consciousness, into a group mind or wave function. So a particle and a wave form would be the purest essence of what I’m trying to say. Physical memory as emotional mass makes an individual a charged particle of consciousness, and then when physical memory as emotional mass becomes an emotional counterbalance between two individuals, it computes their perceptions and actions into a wave form, i.e. orbiting around a common object of attraction that can absorb their combined energies. Hunger and balance would therefore be necessary in order to implement this wave/particle duality.

LCK: It just seems to me that when you describe the need for balance in terms of the “fear of falling,” and relate it back to a puppy’s experiences of being knocked down by his littermates, there’s a subtle implication, at least for me; that the dog is “thinking” about this stuff. “If I’m not careful I might fall…” It’s too linear for me.

KB: Actually I think it’s the other way around, without the hunger/balance continuum, then all one can do is think. For example, telepathy isn’t information without a thought to go with it. If I telepath to a dog an image of it sitting and me feeling good about it sitting and with a cookie in my hand, and then the dog sits, without the dog thinking then how did it want to sit? Either it did so reflexively and so there’s no auto-tuning/feedback mechanism going on, or it thought I would give it a cookie if it conformed to the image and the pleasant feeling I had in my mind of it sitting.

LCK: If two animals feel a combination of attraction and resistance, and one can see that playing out in how they interact, where does the fear of falling come into it? They may be looking for ways to achieve internal balance, both physically and emotionally, but neither is afraid of suddenly falling down, which is what I think is being implied.

KB: The experience of resistance derives from the sense of balance, its most extreme manifestation being the intense sensations induced by a fear of falling. This is why we say something “feels right.” In other words, we have imported the essence of the thing into our gut via our hunger circuitry and we’re still standing, still up-right. As I mentioned earlier there are infinites shades of balance along a gradient of varying intensities and these various sensations are the “tags” by which the nervous system keeps track of the various layers of physical memory. Experiencing intense resistance (as when someone is in our face) displaces the body/mind just as much as falling physically and then the emotional battery releases the deeper and stronger energies held in reserve in order to keep the organism upright. This is where the “bad” in a “bad feeling” comes from, the fear of falling. When a batter leaves the plate and rushes the pitcher for brushing him back, he intends to punch him in the jaw. It’s the emotional collapse that he attributes to the pitcher which angers him and he leaves home plate intending to strike with a balled fist. But when he arrives at the mound, he ends up “breaking his fall” by pushing his hand out forward and grabbing the pitcher. The pitcher does likewise because neither is trained to fight and so they end up wrestling on the ground which favors the heavier stronger man, a bad tactical strategy. In effect, they have broken each other’s fall by pushing the other with their open hands. Martial artists don’t do this. They don’t break their fingers when they strike, unlike Basketball players when they brawl, because they have the training to override these intense physical memories of early life. Similarly, when we stumble in public, we’re embarrassed if not humiliated because our physical memories are attached to our physical center-of-gravity and it rushes up with the p-cog as we attempt to right ourselves.

All instincts and habits have the fear of falling in common as they are the collapse of a wave form, i.e. a feeling, because the balance imperative (output-must-equal-input, action must equal stimulation) popped the bubble. Notice the abject expression of terror on an infant child’s face whenever she is in a state of need, even hunger. This demonstrates that the two are on a continuum, thus the little-brain-in-the-gut has as many neurons as the Big-Brain-in-the-head because all animals feel hunger and balance exactly the same way and therefore this bi-polar makeup becomes the platform for a universal form of communication, a network wide language. Furthermore these sensations are not only universal, but provide the basis by which an organism can rate the intensity of things so while an animal can’t think about one being relative to another, or one moment relative to another, it can feel a rising or lessening of intensity from being near one being relative to another, or between one moment immediately relative to another.

Also, you keep referring to a real field as being electric in nature, which would prohibit animals from differentiating or behaving in a complementary way, and that’s not what I’m saying at all. I don’t see it as an electric field, it’s informational in nature. Information encoded into the field would be decoded as needed to create friction, conflict, symmetry, harmony, emotion, tension, form, dissolution of form, etc., all of which would, I suppose, unfold in the kind of fractal patterns you spoke about in another article.

Granted, at a certain level of both physics and philosophy one has to ask how much of this kind of thing is “real,” and how much is “virtual,” or is there even any difference between the two?

That said, I’m not sure I understand your analysis of how an attack dog is trained via a virtual energy field. My argument was simply that a virtual field couldn’t affect or influence real behavior. The behavior of the dog in question — biting the perp — is very real. If there are puncture marks in the guys’s arm, both the perp and the dog have had a real experience, no matter how the dog’s behavior has been virtually shaped during training.

I have a terrible cold right now, so I’m unable to focus for very long, but I just wanted to add that when Freddie picked up the chicken breast, and I praised him and he dropped it and came over to me, head down, wagging his tail, I have no problem with the idea that his attraction for the chicken breast created a displacement in the emotional field, or the idea that the field was displaced even more by my praise. I have no problem with the idea that both of these events threw him off-balance emotionally (and physically as well, since the two are so closely tied). What I do have problems with are the ideas that a) Freddie suddenly had a fear of falling, both when he saw the chicken breast and when he heard my praise, and b) that his “hunger circuits” are part of what influenced him to drop the chicken breast and come to me instead. You can see how that doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, just in the terms of how you’d explain it to a novice.

Again, I don’t really have a problem with the underlying theory, just the use of those specific terms if for no other reason than they don’t make sense to the average person: Why would Freddies hunger circuits cause him come to me when he had a big chunk of tasty food in his mouth? I can understand that he’d had a backlog of experiences with me, where I put him off balance physically but then provided him with a “ground wire,” and that coming toward me was primarily a matter of grounding his energy. But hunger? No.

Do electric currents experience hunger? Do they want to “ingest” things?

For instance, in the natural world jellyfish have no nervous system so they don’t have “hunger circuits” or “balance circuits,” yet they’re capable of being attracted to “prey,” killing them, and “eating” them (breaking down their energy). One species reportedly even “hunts” in tandem. Certainly as you move up the evolutionary ladder from jellies to fish to amphibians to mammals, you’ll see more and more complex manifestations and iterations of these simplest of phenomena, and maybe I don’t understand the complexities of your theory in full, but I think referring to balance and hunger circuits gets in the way of understanding, at least for me.

My discussion with Lee continues below. I hope our mental gear grinding is of value to you, believe it or not it can change the way we see a dog. Understandably even though quantum mechanics is how our computers, tv sets and cell phones work, it’s hard to see the practical everyday benefit of struggling with such concepts. But in fact, it turns out that what-we-see-is-what-we-get. And if we start seeing our dog in a new way, our dog will see us through new eyes as well.

KB: I’ve never heard of this theory but as described on this site you’ve linked it seems very resonant, except I’m not focusing on that instant intuitive form of quantum communication that he speaks about, just how it plays out through physical memory affecting the individual’s perception, just as if the animal is in a real field. As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on an article where I’ll explain why I feel this way more fully.

LCK: Also, you keep referring to a real field as being electric in nature, which would prohibit animals from differentiating or behaving in a complementary way, and that’s not what I’m saying at all. I don’t see it as an electric field, it’s informational in nature. Information encoded into the field would be decoded as needed to create friction, conflict, symmetry, harmony, emotion, tension, form, dissolution of form, etc., all of which would, I suppose, unfold in the kind of fractal patterns you spoke about in another article.

KB: The field I’m thinking of would be a unified field, not exclusively electric, that’s simply one aspect in conjunction with gravity, nuclear and magnetic, and whatever else there is. The idea of information coming first is very attractive, yet isn’t that a virtual field rather than a real one? This may even be what I’m saying. It means to me that first there’s information, and then energy and then animals turn those states of energy back into the originating information. There’s symmetry to this to be sure.

LCK: I’m not sure I understand your analysis of how an attack dog is trained via a virtual energy field. My argument was simply that a virtual field couldn’t affect or influence real behavior.

KB: I’m saying that the dog doesn’t see reality as it is. First, reality triggers the emotional battery and this summons up physical memory and then the dog sees, hears, senses and even tastes what’s in the battery (in this case the battery is filled with the memories of the helper confronting the dog and yet moving away). This is why it’s even possible to condition animals. The physical/animal mind works the same way in humans as well. The instant Federer sees Nadal serve, he’s informed how to counter-spin and position his body and racquet to equalize its incoming velocity and momentum. He’s not analyzing reality he’s feeling it based on what’s in his battery and having projected his physical center-of-gravity into Nadal. We can see the same thing happening in the spectators sitting at courtside, they can’t resist squirming and rising in their chairs as they’ve projected into the players and are feeling a virtual form of weightlessness and then emotional collapses based on a virtual feeling of falling.
If a dog has energy that isn’t grounded, what does it feel? It feels pressure in its head. This is a virtual electrostatic field. There is no real electrical energy which is why science doesn’t treat it as such and attributes intention to the dog’s behavior when what’s really going on is the dog trying to dissipate that virtual energy via, hackles, barking, growling, baring teeth and the like, or flinching at the moment of drinking from a self-standing water bowl. Where does that sense of electrical tension focused around its muzzle come from? From the neuro-chemical energy of the Big-Brain that hasn’t been converted into smooth muscle motion of the intestines. How does the dog achieve this virtual grounding? From the recapitulation by way of physical memory of its earliest litter and infant imprinting experiences when it smelled mother’s milk and its puppy buddies by smelling their preyful essences (saliva, urine, feces, musk, etc.) all of these sensory inputs being embedded into every feeling the neonate puppy experienced and which led to nursing. So if a puppy isn’t socialized, which is really just a process of generalizing physical memories to many different forms of more complex situations and stimuli, then we observe violent responses to this virtual pressure because emotional grounding can’t occur when near other beings.

LCK: I just wanted to add that when Freddie picked up the chicken breast, and I praised him and he dropped it and came over to me, head down, wagging his tail, I have no problem with the idea that his attraction for the chicken breast created a displacement in the emotional field, or the idea that the field was displaced even more by my praise. I have no problem with the idea that both of these events threw him off-balance emotionally (and physically as well, since the two are so closely tied). What I do have problems with are the ideas that a) Freddie suddenly had a fear of falling, both when he saw the chicken breast and when he heard my praise, and b) that his “hunger circuits” are part of what influenced him to drop the chicken breast and come to me instead. You can see how that doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, just in the terms of how you’d explain it to a novice.

KB: I can definitely understand the confusion but nevertheless there isn’t a discrepancy if I can make the connection between emotional grounding and the hunger circuitry clearer. There are two distinct frames of reference in the above example: Freddie and the chicken, and then the next frame containing Freddie, the chicken and you. In the first frame, output-perfectly matched-input, i.e. the energy in the moment could be completely grounded into the chicken and so no issue of balance and an obvious instance of the hunger circuitry. In the second frame, there was a massive new input (you) and this knocked Freddie out of balance relative to eating chicken and so Freddie had to find a new ground, which became you given a history of emotional grounding between you and Freddie. I believe the physical memory of you-filling-the-void deflected him toward you. Perhaps this analogy is applicable Two atoms are bonded into one molecule, but then this chemical relationship can break down if a solvent is introduced and then a different atom comes along and now a stronger chemical reaction happens between one of the previous atoms with this new atom. These two separate relationships still proceed from the same chemical need for grounding that was the basis of the initial molecule as well as the second; it’s just that the second chemical bond represented a more stable ground. So yes Freddie was grounded into the chicken, but this feeling was collapsed by your focused attention (predatory aspect triggering balance circuitry), and now this deeper level of displacement generated a stronger force of attraction that was grounded into you by virtue of your praise (via his physical memory containing specific memories of being fed by you and pleasantly touched and so on.) and so he came to your side.

LCK: Why would Freddies hunger circuits cause him come to me when he had a big chunk of tasty food in his mouth? I can understand that he’d had a backlog of experiences with me, where I put him off balance physically but then provided him with a “ground wire,” and that coming toward me was primarily a matter of grounding his energy. But hunger? No.

KB: I don’t believe nature would waste software resources on redundant systems, the less amount of code, the less chance for error and so this unified approach I’m proposing with hunger/balance as a platform for complex behavior to elaborate on, is what I’m trying to promulgate. That Freddie could be attracted to you with food in his mouth, is the inverse but equal to a dog eating his food all the faster or even guarding its food bowl upon the approach of the owner. We call one functional and the other dysfunctional, but it comes from the same if output-doesn’t-equal-input then the balance/pressure imperative is coming into play and the greater the need for grounding. Some dogs would simply eat the food faster, some will even attack, in either of these; we’re still dealing with hunger as the grounding mechanism.

LCK: Do electric currents experience hunger? Do they want to “ingest” things?

KB: Hunger is as good as any word to describe why electricity “wants” to run to ground. The compulsion for grounding is simply the nature of its constitution, no reason for it: it’s just the way it is. We’re actually looking at an act of ingestion inside out. Ingestion follows from the need to ground out internal cellular action potentials created by metabolism: at every step an electrical charge needs to be grounded through some kind of chemical reaction. We’re merely being made aware of this need for grounding via what we call hunger which we then attempt to satisfy by ingesting something. It would actually be more accurate to say “I feel ungrounded” rather than “I feel hungry.” And when we’re eating we should say; “I’m becoming grounded.” So it’s not that electricity wants to ingest thins, it’s that we experience a need for grounding which we call hunger and which we then satisfy through ingesting things. It’s an arbitrary delineation we make in our intellect between physics and physiology, body and mind.
While modern biology is based on the “selfish gene” as motive, my energy theory is based on the “selfish electron” that simply “wants” to be grounded. This “want” is the basis of all chemistry and all living beings and I believe that implementing this universal want is the true function of hunger in animals. By tying it into balance there is a perfect tuning component. So the fundamental purpose of hunger isn’t nourishment as important as that may be, but emotional grounding, the act of ingestion being the organisms’ means of apprehending a state of grounding.
The first ten minutes of a cocktail party everyone is generating tons of personality, i.e. dissipating ungrounded nervous energy. We feel electric, tense; perhaps even anxious to “connect” and I don’t know about anyone else but for me the first ten minutes aren’t much fun. However once appetizers and libations begin to flow, everyone starts to relax and the only thing that has changed is that the nerve energy of the Big-Brain is being smoothed out via little-brain wave action and thus we feel “grounded,” i.e. safe, and so now we feel free to open up and that’s when we begin to enjoy ourselves. Interestingly during the course of a party everyone tends to gravitate to the source of grounding and end up congregating in the kitchen: the safest room in the house.

LCK: For instance, in the natural world jellyfish have no nervous system so they don’t have “hunger circuits” or “balance circuits,” yet they’re capable of being attracted to “prey,” killing them, and “eating” them (breaking down their energy). One species reportedly even “hunts” in tandem. Certainly as you move up the evolutionary ladder from jellies to fish to amphibians to mammals, you’ll see more and more complex manifestations and iterations of these simplest of phenomena, and maybe I don’t understand the complexities of your theory in full, but I think referring to balance and hunger circuits gets in the way of understanding, at least for me.

KB: I’ll take it one step further than jellyfish and even protozoa. Plants also don’t have nervous systems and yet they manifest a “hunger” for light—phototropism—and send roots down for stability—geotropism. So photons excite electrons in chloroplasts in the leaves and then these excited electrons now require nutrients from the earth to ground them out in carbon bonds and in this way energy is turned into matter, photosynthesis. Likewise, destabilization of an animal’s physical center-of-gravity excites nerve energy in the Brain, and this needs to be grounded with an act of ingestion in a process of ionization I call emotosynthesis, i.e. turning energy into information.
I’ve also noticed that the dogs with the most energy are invariably ravenous. I don’t think I’ve ever imported or known an imported working dog that was a picky eater, more evidence in my mind that hunger is part of the platform by which complex behavior elaborates from simpler ones.
Also, if we eliminate hunger/balance continuum as a platform, what candidate could fill the bill? I believe we both agree that release-from-tension is the basis of emotion, what’s then is the source of the tension? In my model it’s the dueling agendas between the two brains that can simultaneously render an infinite range of nuance to behavior. For the Big-Brain—output-must-equal-input, in other words action must equal the degree of stimulation that’s coming in. But action without grounding is dangerous so the Brain has to thread a needle—input-must-equal-output—which means that the sensory input (via taste, touch, sound, smell, vision) must be importing preyful essences at a rate commensurate with the amount of energy being expended or else the balance problem is immediately revisited. Meanwhile the little-brain requires constant input of the kind that can be absorbed and processed, otherwise it feels a paralysis—or convulses if the input isn’t preyful and then this latter kind of disturbance becomes a new source of input that the Big-Brain must match with some kind of physical output. We can consider in this context the human sense of disgust. Note that we use the root terms of gustatory in the word denoting how we’ve imported the sight of something into our gut and it’s not grounding. Therefore the capacity for disgust is on the continuum with motion sickness, i.e. the balance circuitry.
Let’s consider when there is such a bounty of preyful essences available to the senses that we could say there is an excess of input over output. In this case the rear-end-goes-faster-than-the-front-end and we see circular behaviors and circumspective approaches. In other words, the dog becomes like a magnetically charged electron, actually deflected as if it’s entering a magnetic field. A classic example is wolves herding prey or a dog forging in the heeling exercise, in this case the dog is more excited by the outing, or a toy/food held by handler, than the heeling behavior is able to conduct and so it seeks to circle the handler as it attempts to rectify the balance problem of being overly stimulated.
Without the hunger/balance platform we would have to find a candidate for an operating system that would logically follow from the electromagnetism that guides the functioning of every cell and neuron, the most basic systems from which complex systems are said to have evolved. This prospective platform must also be able to serve as a universal platform for communication across the species divide to account for the ability of animals to connect in defiance of their genes and negative experiences. Every organism no matter what it evolved to eat, nonetheless feels a state of hunger exactly the same way, and feels the imperative of balance exactly the same way, even birds begin life afraid of falling and must be “kicked out of the nest.” So with the hunger/balance platform it is potentially possible for any two beings to communicate and this is essential to a networked-intelligence. Furthermore this candidate platform that enables emotion would also have to able to implement the phenomena of sexuality, personality and learning in animals.
Of course I could be wrong, however because my understanding of hunger and balance as a confluence that creates animal consciousness that is then guided by emotion as the physical embodiment of the laws of nature, came so slowly into view, the connections between various things one by one sorting themselves out as interlocking pieces to a puzzle, I admit it will be very hard for me to envision another platform more elegant in its completeness and its simplicity. But, my bible is physics so anything’s possible. I just want to know the truth, so help me dog.

this blog is very nice, very dynamic. so I am finding all these interesting answers to things I wondered about. When I had my old gsd girl, and my old chow x, I always thought it was interesting how Fahra would gobble, like gulp down her food. for the longest time I fed her by hand because I was worried she’d bloat eating like that. Misha would nibble, cruch crunch chunch….pause, crunch crunch crunch….pause. Fahra, steam shovel, Misha, sharp shooter. At some point Fahras breeder roped me into helping her out by taking care of her 13 gsd,s so she could take a vacation. All of them ate like steam shovels too. All of them gave kisses too when I put their food down, except for the one really tough one I just threw a new bowl in for every meal. I always thought it was because they were Now, with the new pup I have been feeding Abady granular which is really energy dense, mabye too much so as his ears get red after he eats -and have found the my new dog Mochi gobbles itless, however, when I feed kibble, he gobbles more.
Lee we tried the bandana, he removed it :).

Okay, I was wrong about the necessity for there to be an actual rather than a virtual field. From what I’ve been reading about quantum mechanics, virtual fields can influence actual behavior. However, that’s at a quantum level. And while it’s fun to compare the individuated and uninidivuated emotional states that we see in dogs to the particles and waves we “see” in quantum mechanics, I’m not sure quantum effects can be seen at such a macro level, i.e., coming when called or failing to do so.

I also agree that plants can be “hungry,” but since the process you’re talking about (or the one I think you’re talking about) includes “ingesting” water, oxygen, emotional energy, and sensory impressions, I still think you need to find a better word.

Maybe that’s just me.

One final note, it’s possible that a dog doesn’t have any actual physical memories. We know that the hippocampus is where memories seem to be stored, but from what I understand all we really know for sure is that when the hippocampus is injured or removed or blitzed with electricity, memories disappear, and that it’s one area of the brain that lights up during certain types of memory-related tasks. But no one knows how memories are stored, what they’re actually made of, how they’re coded and decoded. It’s possible that since the morphic field is said to contain all forms and behaviors, perhaps it could be the actual mnemonic library for all living organisms, and that the hippocampus is simply the processing unit that registers life experiences through each organism’s DNA, and then taps into the field (through photon transmission) as necessary to retrieve the data. This would answer your problem of needing as simple a code as possible. Nothing could be simpler than having a general class of experiences in the data bank that would be decoded differently through the unique structures of each organism’s DNA.

I’m just spitballing, but it’s something to ponder, perhaps. I know there’s some data/conjecture out there which suggests that DNA is capable of emitting photons to other parts of the body or even to other organisms. Why not have a photon-based link-up to the morphic field? Wouldn’t that solve the problem?

Great website on photon transmission. I definitely believe this is going on. My theory is that when the two brains are reconciled, and the dog is able to flip polarities rapidly so as to become entrained with another, that an “emoton” is created, (paired electrons or photons from the two-brains in the makeup of the individual, and this emoton takes up residence in their heart, and this then would be a form of communication with that other being likewise entrained. There’s another site called Heart Math I believe and they report that the heart’s magnetic field is 5,000 times stronger than the brains, and just by being near or being touched by someone, the hearts fields change the brain’s field. So there is a lot of promising research coming in.
I’m concentrating on my model of physical memory as the crude dynamic which first differentiates two animals in deference to the laws of physics as a platform for this more ethereal aspect of existence. As I shall later attempt to explain, physical behaviors are an expression of quantum mechanics.
I think the reason we haven’t been able to model memory is that it’s happening at the cellular level, every cell being a physical manifestation of the morphic field to which you refer. So the inside always mirrors the inside.

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